Wednesday, April 2, 2014

I had the pleasure of talking with Elizabeth Spencer in February. She is a cousin of mine, her mother a Teoc McCain. In her memoir Landscapes of the Heart she has a chapter devoted to the McCains. In the chapter she has a short history of our clan, which in my research over they years I discovered was remarkably accurate. It is a romantic tell of Highland Scots who supported Mary Queen of Scots and migrated to Ireland after her fall from power, which is pretty much what happened. My current book project is Finding the McCains which is the story of why and how I located our distant McCain cousin back in Ireland.

Elizabeth Spencer is the daughter of Senator McCain’s paternal
grandfather’s sister.Elizabeth Spencer is a talented and
accomplished writer of novels and short stories; she
could walk into a room with William Faulkner and Eudora Welty and take her
place among them.As Eudora Welty
herself put it:
"It has never been doubted that Elizabeth Spencer knows the small, Southern, backwoods hilltown down to the bone. This she transforms by the accuracy of her eye and ear, talent and a certain prankish gaiety of spirit into a vital and absorbing novel."

Perhaps the best known work of Elizabeth Spencer would be her 1960 short novel, The Light of the Piazza. It is a very poignant story set in Italy that was made into a feature film in 1962 staring Olivia de Havilland, George Hamilton, and Yvette Mimieux. Elizabeth is still writing at age 93, her latest work is Starting Over, a collection of short stories and highly recommended.

Gaelic Warrior

Gaelic Lord, Iona

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the gods only go with you if you put yourself in their path. And that takes courage...

Mary Stewart, The Chrystal Cave

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Barry R McCain is an independent scholar, writer and genetic genealogy consultant living in Oxford, Mississippi. He has a BA with honours from Ole Miss in history and is a Gaelic speaker. He is the Director of the Ulster Heritage DNA Project and several other DNA projects that focus on Argyll kinship groups. Mr. McCain is available as a genetic genealogy consultant for families of Irish and Scottish ancestry and he specializes in Ulster, West Highlands, Hebrides, and western Lowland Scotland research. He is available for speaking engagements on the topics relating to Ulster, Scottish, and Scots-Irish, history, and Irish and Scottish genetic genealogy.